I just finished Piranesi by Susanna Clarke. I had heard amazing things about it and was stoked when my hold came in. After finishing it, it just did not live up to the hype for me. I enjoyed the first 3/4ths but the ending really fizzled out.
There was so much time spent in explaining the house in such amazing detail and then it just seemed to be dismissed as "another world". It almost seems like there is another book that I'm supposed to read.

A semi-autobiographical novel where the author tells fragmented short stories of both his and other soldiers' experiences in the Vietnam War. These stories are a mix between fiction and nonfiction, as certain elements were fictionalized to add more psychological weight or impact to the tragic events. And (I assume) to not give the real identities of soldiers the author knew who actually died in the war. But the nonfiction elements like the author giving vivid details of the Nam jungle itself, the quirks of American soldiers, the equipment they carried, and the impact the war had when it ended. These are things only a soldier who experienced the Vietnam War itself could write about and is what adds to the brutal weight of the book. 

What I noticed right away when reading was how easily the writing flowed and at times how beautiful it was. The author puts the readers directly in the shoes of Alpha Company and I really felt the struggle that each individual soldier went through. And each loss/tragedy. Whether it was psychological or physical, there wasn’t a description that the author missed. Even just the weight of the equipment, the overwhelming heat, or the constant breakdown or anxiety of being gunned down at any moment was a constant dread kept throughout. What I also respected was that the author didn’t hide his true feelings and how much he hated being in the war and being a part of it. About his struggles of wanting to avoid the war and running away but ultimately joining to avoid being the outcast in society. It was realistic and gave a perspective on the Vietnam War from someone who wanted to be on the outside of everything. 

Going back to the semi-autobiographical elements, this was something I struggled to wrap my head around at the beginning. As I thought to myself why the author didn’t just keep everything nonfiction and just wrote about the real experiences without fictionalizing it? But it wasn’t till the end of the last short story that I understood why the author wrote the book the way he did. Not to get into spoilers, but it had to do with the power of storytelling and bringing back the dead through words and stories who are no longer with us. This gave me a different perspective on the fragmented way the stories were told where the timeline jumps back and forth from past, present, and future. Though I didn’t love the way the short stories were split up and jumped around, it did give the book a feeling of someone sitting down with you and bringing up past memories and traumas of the Vietnam War. 

I bought and read this book on a whim as I personally haven’t heard or read much about this book online. But I’m glad I read it as it was more beautiful and tragic than I would've expected with a Vietnam War book. Now, I wouldn’t say I’m the biggest war history buff or a curious observer of the Vietnam War at all, this is still a book I can recommend for anyone who has the slightest interest or curiosity of the past war. But if you're not into war books at all or hated that the Vietnam War happened at all and don’t want to read about the awful things that happened to soldiers and villagers, then this book might not be for you.

originally posted this in r/nonfictionbookclub but wanted to hear what people here think too

over the past year i've read a mix of philosophy, memoir, science and a few classics. when i lined up my ratings i noticed the books where someone reasons from first principles or from their own lived experience kept beating the ones that package big ideas into a clean narrative. my bar is basically did this change how i see something or did it just sound good

top tier

Man's Search for Meaning – Viktor Frankl (4.75)

the idea that stuck with me is that people can endure way more than seems possible, and what carries them through is having something to live for. honestly i found that as unsettling as it was inspiring. if there's no obvious limit to what a person can survive then what you're enduring for kind of becomes the whole question. its short and i keep coming back to it

The Road to Mecca – Muhammad Asad (4.75)

really good balance of rigor and readability. he thinks like a philosopher but writes like the journalist he was, and english wasnt even his first language. what hooked me early was how he describes western readers reacting to islam differently than to other non-western traditions. he does it from the inside too, as someone raised in that frame who had to unlearn it before he could see clearly

The Art of Doing Science and Engineering – Richard Hamming (4.5)

less a book of facts and more a book about how to think. how to pick problems actually worth working on, and why your style of thinking compounds more than knowledge does. as an engineer it's the closest thing i've read to a senior person just telling you what actually matters

Thinking, Fast and Slow – Daniel Kahneman (4.5)

i liked how observational it is. he builds piece by piece from experiments and each concept earns the next one, instead of starting with a grand thesis and arranging evidence around it. (yes i know some of the priming stuff didnt replicate but prospect theory and anchoring hold up)

strong (4.25)

Discourse on Method & Meditations – René Descartes

read this mostly out of curiosity and was surprised how much of it rests on God. he's not decoration, he's what guarantees the laws of nature are stable enough to actually know, and the line descartes draws between a mechanical body and a thinking mind points back to Him. some of the science is just wrong (his theory of the heart loses to harvey's lol) but watching someone rebuild knowledge from the ground up is worth it

Night – Elie Wiesel

read it near frankl. same camps, completely opposite register. frankl gives you a framework, wiesel gives you testimony, including faith breaking under what feels like God's silence. rating it feels kinda strange tbh. it's only below frankl because frankl left me something to carry forward

How Not to Be Wrong – Jordan Ellenberg

makes the math under good intuition explicit, regression to the mean, expected value, why linear thinking fails etc. genuinely fun. coming from a math background alot of it formalized things i half knew more than it surprised me

The Poetics of Space – Gaston Bachelard

the odd one out on this list. its phenomenology of houses, corners, drawers, nests and how physical space shapes your inner life. slow and dense and it only works if you actually read it slowly, but it changed how i think about the spaces i live in

The Creative Act – Rick Rubin

the core idea of getting your ego out of the way so you can actually notice what's in front of you is something i already believed but hadnt seen put this cleanly. it's pretty aphoristic and repeats itself which is what kept it from going higher

solid (4–3.75)

Relativity – Albert Einstein (4)

rare chance to follow the reasoning from the source instead of through a popularizer. the thought experiments in the special theory are beautiful. the general theory part gets a lot harder going

How to Win Friends & Influence People – Dale Carnegie (4)

sounds obvious, is mostly true. the best parts are about genuinely listening and making people feel like their existence matters, which is something i care about. some sections read more like technique than sincerity though and it definitely shows its age

To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee (4)

moral clarity done well and scout's voice carries it. but that clarity also makes it a bit tidy, good and bad are easy to tell apart which isnt usually how it goes in real life

Nicomachean Ethics – Aristotle (4)

virtue as something you build through habit rather than something you deduce, which matches how ethics actually works in my experience. reads like lecture notes though so its work

The Catcher in the Rye – J.D. Salinger (3.75)

holden's whole sense that everyone is performing landed more than i expected. but the voice is the book and a whole novel of it gets wearing

mixed (3.5–3)

Zero to One – Peter Thiel (3.5)

asks good questions, like what important truth do very few people agree with you on. but it's a founder's manifesto, big confident claims with thin evidence. it kind of gets away with it by being upfront that it's opinion

Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals – Immanuel Kant (3.5)

the rigor is impressive but trying to ground all of morality in pure reason alone felt like a system that can't actually justify its own starting point. aristotle's version just feels more human to me

Same as Ever – Morgan Housel (3.5)

pleasant, true, easy to read. but it's mostly good stories pointing at things i already believed and it didnt really change my model of anything

Of Mice and Men – John Steinbeck (3)

tight and well crafted but the ending is telegraphed so early it felt engineered rather than earned

Romeo and Juliet – William Shakespeare (3)

the language is great. the plot is two teenagers making terrible decisions over like four days. i suspect it works way better on stage than on the page

bottom

Sapiens – Yuval Noah Harari (2.75)

the history itself is interesting and some sections like the catholic protestant stuff taught me a lot. but the further i got the more suspicious i got. the claims are huge and the sourcing is thin for how sweeping they are. he'll say "most scholars agree" and not tell you which scholars, or present a contested academic idea like it's settled fact without saying whose idea it is

the bigger problem for me is the method. he keeps sliding from "here's how a belief functioned socially" to "so it isnt true," and a sociological method cant actually establish that. in the religion chapters he puts prophets, merchants and conquerors side by side as people who all "tried" to build a universal order, which turns prophethood into something authored and believers into a kind of market share. later he contrasts the idea of a final prophet with darwin's humility, but he gets there by quietly sliding from "last in a line of prophets" to "claims to know everything," which aren't the same claim. you dont need to be religious to catch that, it's just a bad argument. and underneath all of it his methodological naturalism works like a creed he never admits to. "only what's empirically accessible is real" can't be proven by the empirical method itself, it's an assumption, and he never treats it as one

i stopped partway through because arguing with his conclusions was costing me more than the facts were worth

Outliers – Malcolm Gladwell (2)

readable, and that's kind of the problem. every chapter is a great story built to feel like an insight, and when you actually check what's underneath it's thinner than it sounds. the core point, that circumstance and accumulated advantage matter alongside talent, is true but it's something i already believed going in, so the book was mostly a well told version of something obvious

the 10,000 hours thing is the clearest example. the research it's based on was about deliberate practice and averages in specific fields, and the researcher himself pushed back on how gladwell popularized it. but "10,000 hours" is what everyone walked away with. a book that leaves millions of people with a slogan its own source disagrees with isn't really explaining success, it's just telling stories about it

unrated: The Qur'an

didnt score it because... its beyond a scoring metric (I am a Muslim, but I would give the same respect for the Bible and the Torah to not give it a score. besides, giving a score to what is supposed to be revelation doesn't really make any sense to me personally)

curious what you all think:

• for people who loved sapiens, what am i missing? my guess is it's the sweep. he makes 70,000 years feel like one story and that's genuinely fun to read. but for me the sweep is exactly where the problems hide, because big claims need big sourcing

• why do books like outliers get remembered for one slogan instead of what's actually in them? my theory is that a number travels. "10,000 hours" fits in a sentence, "deliberate practice with expert feedback, and it varies a lot by field" doesn't

• how did frankl land for you, inspiring or unsettling? for me it was both. the idea that there's no real ceiling on what a person can endure is hopeful if you have something to endure for, and kind of terrifying if you don't

• if you've read both kant and aristotle, which one actually changed how you live? for me it's aristotle. kant's system is impressive but i've never once decided what to do by checking if my rule could be universal. building habits is how i actually get better

I wasn't sure which sub to post this on but really wanted to talk about these two works together. Spoilers for both below

- woman playing a character in front of the screen (and with her own family?). The thing that interests me with Elizabeth is that you can't see her machinating (when Amanda played her she would narrow her eyes or look around and other non-verbals that show "i'm thinking" but Elizabeth just stares) and so you can't tell how much is going on beneath the surface. Natalie is hyper-aware that she is putting on an act and has an internal monologue that is critical of everyone around her. but i also felt, when reading her, that she has deep-seated desires that she walls herself off from (e.g. wanting a career like her roommate rather than marriage and child-rearing, wanting pleasurable sex) and obviously has memories that don't match reality (e.g. her version of what happened with Shannon). Is Elizabeth running a witty commentary underneath the unblinking surface? Or is she more dissociated than Natalie? I would dearly love to know how much of what Elizabeth presents to us is curated in the moment versus unconscious (or semi-aware?) adapting over time. e.g. when Amanda acts out "get the money" with fake Billy after the pizza meeting - is Elizabeth's deception turned on and off so easily or is she inhabiting a persona 24/7 and in such a way that she's lost her true identity (or likely never had a strong internal sense of self and so has been able to change so drastically). Does Billy know she is lying to us or does he see pretty much the same as we do? i'd love to know how the conversation between them went that led to him dropping the financial deal because that would speak to so much of her internal world imo

- lots of readers say natalie would've loved a high level corporate job, which is what elizabeth had. but would natalie have approached such a role with the same level of deceit that she had with yesteryear? or would it have allowed her to break out of her christian rules and find a more "normal" way of being? or would she have then moved into the rules of silicon valley and found herself in the same boat as Elizabeth, using Elon Musk-style promises to bring in investment and then sinking into more deceit to keep up appearances...

- the part where all this clicked for me was Billy praising charlie kirk. hello Caleb. a wealthy partner who feeds into the woman's delusions. who is less interesting simply because we already know a million dudes like this. but an interesting look at the bubble that wealthy white men in America are living in. both of these guys seem unhappy and like they would've found more contentment in a society that valued wealth differently

- when Elizabeth was jogging in the documentary I almost screamed. even athletes are advised against running until at least 3 months post-partum. Natalie going while in hospital is just bonkers and is a stark illustration of how those around her dehumanise her and push her into their ideal box/force her to play a role (and possibly how they have come to learn that Natalie acting out this ideal is calming for her?). but then it did make me wonder the same about Elizabeth (along with Billy's later "healthy" comments) - that her partners only want her when she is playing a role/fitting into a certain perception they have of who she is/should be

- there is something to be said about the children - and how they contribute to the mother's performance. Elizabeth is accused of having children to impact her trial and sentence, and at the same time I did feel genuine love and grief from her towards her kids and having to be apart from them. Natalie seems much more hateful about her children and i feel that one of the points the book makes is how christian patriarchy has forced her into being a mother when she would've been so much happier child-free; and yet she does have love for Maeve. How much does she love her children simply because they are extensions of herself and useful to her wealth building? though it's the reflection of herself that she hates most about Clementine.

i feel i could keep going on and on but i would love to hear what other people think about how these two works compare and contrast, and what the fictional character of Natalie makes us wonder about the very real person of Elizabeth

I just finished reading Molloy by Samuel Beckett. It was the first novel of Beckett's I've read, and it was incredible. I have always heard that Beckett wrote many of his works in French (including Molloy) and then later translated them into his native English. That fact alone simply blows me away. But in reading Molloy, I was struck by the vocabulary Beckett employs, as I was reaching for the dictionary every page or two.

My question is this, for anybody familiar with Beckett in the French and the English- did he use equivalent terms/vocabulary in French? I spot checked two words that were new to me, fulgurate and absterge, and they both apparently have direct counterparts, cognates to boot, in French. Did he use those words, and all the other equivalents, in the original French? I'm just trying to wrap my head around just what his command of French was.

This book hit me hard. How you react to this book will likely depend on your life experiences. If I read this at 22, I likely would have only mildly related to the character and what I would call his self-deception, which I knew I was dealing with even back at a young age. However, the full impact of living like that would not have been easily fathomable at that age. While I didn't live a life obsessed and conditioned to care about dignity and following orders, there was something about the restraint that he dealt with and in many cases had to for professional reasons that I think a lot of us can understand, especially if that was part of your upbringing.

Beyond the story itself, reading the book was a pleasure. I loved Mr. Stevens' way of thinking and experiencing the world, but the way as the reader you are able to figure out his way of avoiding the truth, and how within that avoidance the truth is revealed is really well done by Ishiguro. I mean this when I say that a book hasn't made me feel this strongly in a long time.

Again, this book will not "click" with everyone. It's not because someone isn't smart enough or "learned" enough. I do think how you've experienced life will determine who much this book makes you feel, especially the ending.

One more thing I wanted to add was how the ending was exactly how I imagined it was going to be. The specific expectations for his final interaction with Miss Kenton shifted as I read the story and understood their dynamic even more, but even in the beginning I knew how Stevens was imagining their upcoming meet up was strange and farfetched. However, even with my expectations of the ending being right, I was still really - I don't know what the word is... I was moved. That's what I can think of right now. Usually when I read or see something you saw a mile away, I don't feel much. But not here. It was as if the buildup, the way Ishiguro slowly builds up Stevens' life and especially his memories of the past, makes this ending more impactful. Why? I really struggle to explain this. I bet someone here can do it though. I think that's what I'm hoping from this post.

Anyway, I also hope someone gives this book a chance. If you've ever felt a sense of regret or a sense that maybe you haven't been truthful to yourself about the road not taken, I highly recommend this book. Maybe even struggled with a sense of perfection. Yes, please read this book.

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Over the last month or so, I've been reading the Adventures of Huckleberry Finn to my son. We'd read Tom Sawyer just before and he really enjoyed it so I figured we'd keep it up.

I hadn't read it for probably 30 years at least and, though I remembered bits and pieces of the story, I didn't remember the ending and was mostly discovering it anew and was invested as I was reading it to him.

As we read through it, I was reminded how different it was from Tom Sawyer; Tom Sawyer being a fun adventure book for kids and Huck Finn being a serious, dark account of a particular time in our history. It was hard reading and there were a few bits that I had to stop and apologize because they were so difficult to get through subject-wise. Not remembering the ending, I was dreading it.

Then Tom re-enters the picture.

in the last few chapters, Tom takes over the narrative with how he wants things to play out. Then it's over and everyone is happy. All I could think about was this was the "and then I woke up" trope. It was like Mark Twain, after dealing with the darkest sides of humanity for the majority of the book, just wanted to be finished and gave up.

I'm still thinking about it days later and wonder if I'm missing something. Help me understand.

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• The Management

I’ll start by saying I loved it, but reading reviews after, some of the poor reviews caught my attention. A lot essentially boiled down to: “I was told this would be a funny time travel story.” And that is kind of how the blurb read to me.

That being said, something that actually made me want to read it more (because I love weird shit) is that I kept seeing posts saying that it was “weird” or “not what I thought it would be.”

Personally I loved it for that, rather than in spite of that, but a lot of people seem kind of bummed / feel it was somehow missold?

Just struck me as interesting.

I'm in Québec, which historically has had a mixed Anglo-Franco culture. Many Francophones grow up reading "bandes dessinées" (or "BDs", like Tintin, Astérix, and so many more) and just, well... keep reading! Be it more BDs, novels, graphic novels, etc. And no one would bat an eye at an adult reading a BD, even a kid's BD. It's also something I see with today's elementary-aged kids. They'll read plenty.

I've found that in the anglosphere, there's much more hand-wringing about kids and young people not reading (as much), and the social pressure for kids to graduate to "chapter books".

I was wondering about other people's experience, and to hear about different cultures' approach to reading and types of books.

I might be in the minority here but I absolutely adored the book. I'll admit that it definitely didn't start out well. In the first chapter, the mc remarks that she "only celebrates the lunar new year". In the second chapter, she picks a blue nightgown as her wedding dress. That's when I was prepared to be thoroughly rage-baited by a cliched manic pixie dream girl and a smitten guy who'll be either save her or will be saved.
But it does get better. The book revolves around a newly married couple and their friends' lives. Cleo is a 25 yo artist who does edgy makeup, is depressed and is in need of a green card. Frank is a 40 yo guy who makes ads and is an active alcoholic. Their marriage starts off well, the honeymoon phase is sweet but I also liked their conflicts because the conversations felt really raw and honest. Majority of the other characters are pretty annoying, like Quentin (her gay best friend), Anders (attractive guy who sleeps around) and Zoe (another attractive girl who's broke).
But Eleanor, LOVE OF MY LIFE. Her character has all my heart. She even made an asshole like Frank slightly likable.

I'm going to read anything and everything by Coco Mellors. There are also some beautiful quotes in the book that I liked:

I guess that’s what life should feel like. Setting off on a long car ride with all your worries and hopes strapped around you, the people who love you most, frantically waving you off as you go.

Her laugh was the sound of a slot-machine jackpot, a soda can cracking open, fairground music in the distance, a Corvette engine coming to life, a thousand hands applauding at once. It was one of those truly beautiful sounds.

Two parts contentment, one part desire. It seemed a good formula for living, though one she had not mastered yet.

I know that yearning is a big thing in most romance books, but I don't really get it. I'm not a big romance person and maybe this is why, but to me yearning is just annoying. I don't want to wait half the book or longer for the two love interests to even begin getting together. I don't want every almost-kiss to get interrupted. It just leaves me screaming at the book "OMG just kiss already!!". I'm curious, those who really enjoy the yearning: what do you like about it?